You’ve seen storefronts like this, usually located under the El. The interior is speckled with a layer of grim and tepid aspirations, the worn-out furnishings a sad grace note. Every time you pass by, the place looks empty save for a guy or two behind the counter. How do they stay in business, you wonder? Most don’t. That’s the broad overlay in Tracy Letts’ new melancholic comedy (at the Steppenwolf) which he has set in Chicago—the city where this recent Pulitzer-winner has lived most of his adult life, and perhaps more importantly, the city where he became a playwright. Like Brett Neveu’s recent “Gas for Less” (at the Goodman), “Superior Donuts” presents the little guy as endangered species, fighting off the encroachment of chain branding and impersonal transactions. Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean) is the proprietor of said donut shop, an aging hippie so withdrawn from life that he retreats into a haze of pot smoke whenever reality punches through the glass door of his store. McKean’s performance is enigmatic—a resigned sigh that only begins to suggest Arthur’s state of mind. The role is bookended by Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill), the young, frenetic African-American Arthur hires as his assistant. Franco is ambitious and restless, but his inner life is just as mysterious—both he and Arthur are characters in search of meaning, and their uneasy co-existence mirrors the ethnic jostling of the neighborhood itself. (Yasen Peyankov has a terrific time as the Russian-born owner of an electronics store where he offers “the personal touch. And Croatian pornography.”) I like the way Letts parses the idea of disinterest-as-racism. The debate is false, but the spirit behind it is true. That dichotomy is everywhere in this production (directed by Tina Landau), where the dialogue rhythms don’t synch up with the real world, even if the sentiments do. You’re very much aware that you’re watching a play, and it’s only when Robert Maffia strolls onstage, playing a bookie in a cashmere coat, that things abruptly snap into place. Suddenly you’re immersed in the drama at hand. Landau’s pacing is deliberate, perhaps to a fault—the production includes a protracted stage fight that is so plainly fake in its execution that it becomes theoretical—but Letts has an ear for idioms that I really admire. “Look at you, all worked up over some female lady,” Franco tells Arthur, and it’s the kind of throw-away line you remember more than anything else. (Nina Metz)

At Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 North Halsted, (312)335-1650. Thu-Fri 7:30pm/Sat-Sun 3pm & 7:30pm/Tue-Wed 7:30pm. $20-$68. Through August 24.

It’s one thing to fetishize the good old days, but this might be the most melancholy example yet. Inspired by an actual mom-and-pop gas station on the North Side that fell victim to market forces and changing neighborhood tastes, the themes that arise in Brett Neveu’s latest play might as well be outlined in the neon light that promises “Gas for Less.” Nobody likes change. Gentrification is a bitch. In today’s economy, the underdog is the dying dog. Dexter Bullard’s production at the Goodman has a sprawling, all-day-long quality to it, and anyone who has logged time behind a retail counter will recognize the sensation. (Tom Burch’s set is fantastic, a lived-in diorama stocked with old school mini-mart details.) But it’s like watching an ice cube melt; authentic and terribly boring. A photo can suggest an entire world within its borders; the three-dimensional reality of actors on a stage requires something more. Neveu captures the overall picture, but there’s not much life beneath the surface. (Nina Metz)

At Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, (312)443-3800.  This production is now closed.

Like a shoddy campaign run on cigarette fumes and Rolaids, nothing quite comes together in Brett Neveu’s musical about Chicago politics at Strawdog Theatre. Set on election night, family and campaign workers assemble to sweat out the returns for Cook County president. The hotel-as-election-night-fort has always been a bizarro biosphere, and I like that Neveu stuck everyone in it for the duration. But don’t look for much insight into Windy City politicking. We never actually see the candidate, which is fine because his carefully shellacked wife (played ably by Anne Sheridan Smith) provides all we need to know about the aging man upstairs who can barely conceive of a life booted out of office. Nor does the piece make a solid case for itself as a musical. Occasionally Mikhail Fiksel’s score has a noir-ish feel to it, but overall there aren’t enough trained voices here to carry it off. Or at least sing on key. Either way, the music doesn’t capture a sense that Chicago’s political scene is a skeezy breed unto itself. Only one number, with a quartet of besuited men singing about “politics as usual,” makes it halfway out of the gate, a pleasantly jaded amalgam of clichés. What’s more Chicago than that? (Nina Metz)

At the Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway, (773)525-6797. This production is now closed.

A barrage of bad English accents tumble forth from this new comedy, plus a Scottish brogue thicker than worsted wool. In fact, everything is intentionally bad in this spoof of the country manor mystery—“a wildly costumed Piccadilly drama”—where the stiff upper lips are matched only by the number of eyes popping out of their sockets. And for the first twenty minutes or so, it’s like the best of Carol Burnett. Every British cliché is skewered here. A host introduces the play, “Masterpiece Theatre”-style, like John Houseman’s deranged cousin recently let out from the cellar. The story unfolds on a two-dimensional set that is supposed to look cheap and cheesy (to suit the narrative), and if you’re looking for gags aplenty, this is certainly the place to be. But don’t even ask for a plot synopsis. Something about a ghostly menace on the property, and the seduction of a young lady who literally blends into the furniture. “What’s that I smell?” burls the gamekeeper, played by Chris Hainsworth, as he strolls through the library of the big house. “Why it’s the unmistakable stench of the filthy rich.” Hainsworth attacks the role like he just wandered off the set of “Braveheart.” It’s a very funny performance, though the script—penned by Lisa Dillman, Rebecca Gilman, and Brett Neveu—can’t sustain its breakneck pace for very long. (Nicholas Minas and Noah Simon co-direct the Blindfaith Theatre production.) “He is a man among men—if the men are without penises,” was my favorite one-liner. But there aren’t enough of these gems to go around. (Nina Metz)

At the Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph, (312)742-8497. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Brett Neveu’s newest play (in a world premiere at A Red Orchid) gently suggests you choose your own interpretation of the contents therein. It’s not entirely clear what the play is about; Neveu isn’t offering pat answers, at any rate. Don’t take that as a drawback, but don’t walk in expecting a tidy narrative, either. Over the span of ninety minutes, the scenes cut back and forth between a training center that preps American travelers for the possibility of kidnapping overseas, and a coffee shop where the would-be victims—three women, professional types—meet during training breaks. In a broad sense, the play deals with the underlying feeling of a world gone crazy since 9/11, but Neveu is more specific in his focus. All politics are local, and I suppose all problems are local, too. Unless there is a terrorist directly in your face, it’s more likely that your own personal guilt, fury and life dissatisfaction will churn your stomach in knots. Is there such a thing as a tragedy of manners? Consider the things we do to one another in the name of polite conversation. The judgments that get passed off as friendly advice; the probing questions that imply there’s something wrong with you if you don’t want to share. The coffee klatch as a game of human Pac-Man—your fellow Americans as giant orbs with jaws that never stop flapping. At least, that’s what I got out of the show, directed by Edward Sobel with precise attention to Neveu’s banal rhythms of speech. The three women are terrific: Kirsten Fitzgerald, who is perfectly too loud and too much in her orange sherbet sweater poncho; Jennifer Engstrom, a brittle, high-strung yuppie in stiletto pumps; and Mierka Girten, whose buttoned-up, quiet personality masks a suppressed, thundering of rage. Everything is a digression, but there are two mini-anecdotes tucked in the script—one about a rape and murder at a nursing home, the other about a rabid dog attack—and couched within the play’s larger ambiguity, these monologues emerge as bright beacons of storytelling. (Nina Metz)

At A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 North Wells, (312)943-8722.  This production is now closed.

By Nina Metz

This is a ripe time for Chicago playwrights according to Brett Neveu, whose latest work, “Weapons of Mass Impact,” opens Monday at A Red Orchid Theatre. 

Over the past six years or so, no other local playwright has had as much new work produced as Neveu. You’d think the guy has it made. “The problem with that is ‘playwright’ and ‘have it made’—those two things never go together,” he says as we talk by phone.

He made this observation, by the way, from his new home in Los Angeles, where he and wife Kristen moved in August with their daughter, Lia Pearl, who turned 1 last week. “Mostly it was because we had the baby and we needed to have some more stability money-wise—or at least try to get that stability.” Kristen, who is a mixed-media artist, was the first to land a job. She works at Warner Bros. in the art department. And like so many before him, Neveu is hoping to write for television and film.

If he lands a lucrative writing gig—which seems likely, judging by his success to date—he will join the ranks of other nationally known playwrights who subsidize their theater dreams with Hollywood dollars, including Craig Wright (“Six Feet Under”), Theresa Rebeck (“Law & Order: Criminal Intent”) and Chicago’s own Rick Cleveland (who was just hired to write for AMC’s “Mad Men”).

It is a smart move for Neveu, 37, who was supporting his family primarily on teaching jobs (most recently at Northwestern) and playwriting commissions, which pay anywhere from $5,000-$10,000, depending on the theater. Neveu has had no shortage of commissions—companies such as the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Northlight and Writers’ have paid him to write plays. Currently he has commissions from the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York and Royal Court Theatre in London.

I’ve been commissioned many, many times,” he says, but “I’ve only had one theater produce the play they commissioned.” That would be “Old Town,” a musical about backroom political dealings set on election night in Cook County, which debuts in April at Strawdog. “They put it in the season before it was even finished,” a rare show of confidence from a theater.

But Neveu’s artistic home in Chicago is still A Red Orchid, where the claustrophobic dimensions of the stage seem perfectly suited to “Weapons of Mass Impact,” about a trio of kidnapped women who endure interrogation at the hands of their foreign captors—and at the hands of one another. 

The play is part of a trilogy that began with “Harmless,” seen last year at Timeline. (Part three is called “Old Glory” which Neveu is working on for Writers’ Theatre.) The plays each take place in the middle of the current decade, and they focus on how regular folks “mentally deal with the situations that crop up as a result of a country at war in the modern age.”

Despite the heavy subject matter, Neveu’s plays contain a sly sense of humor. He’s not writing jokes. The way Neveu sees it, people are just funny when they talk. “Especially in tense situations.” He doesn’t craft the perfectly articulated argument that would never transpire in real life. He writes dialogue that is riddled with awkward social niceties and subconscious hostility. He writes the way people genuinely talk, which is hilarious if you really listen to it.

The move to L.A. notwithstanding, Neveu is focused on theater. A possible strike by the Writers Guild of America “makes it harder for me [to get a job right now], so I’ll just wait until resolution happens. Whatcha gonna do?” He has a pair of commissions to work on, at any rate.

And more to the point, “My end goal was never to be a screenwriter or a TV writer. My end goal was to be a playwright, and that’s always been the case. Actually, my end goal is to be a writer, whatever it’s for. Actually, my end goal is just to have a job that I like.”

And regardless of what the future may bring, “I will always consider myself a Chicago playwright.”

“Weapons of Mass Impact” opens October 22 at A Red Orchid Theater, 1513 North Wells, (312)943-8722.